Pasolini and Third World Hunger: an Approach to Cinema Novo Through 'La Ricotta'
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Pasolini and Third World hunger: an approach to Cinema Novo through 'La ricotta' Article Accepted Version Elduque, A. (2016) Pasolini and Third World hunger: an approach to Cinema Novo through 'La ricotta'. Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 4 (3). pp. 369-385. ISSN 20477368 doi: https://doi.org/10.1386/jicms.4.3.335_7 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/65671/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Published version at: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=215/ To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jicms.4.3.335_7 Publisher: Intellect All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online Pasolini and Third World hunger: an approach to Cinema Novo through La ricotta Among the numerous connections that exist between Latin American and Italian cinema, the link between Pasolini’s works and Brazilian films is one of the most evident and frequently analysed. This relation is so fruitful that, although it has been the focus of a huge number of works, it remains an endless source for cultural and formal analysis. In this article I will be focusing on a movie by the Italian filmmaker, the medium-length film La ricotta, and on certain shared features with Brazilian Cinema Novo of the 1960s. To that end, I will be considering the pairing of hunger-consumption, not only in order to place the films in a certain political and audiovisual context, but also to approach them aesthetically. Simon of the Desert and consumption At the end of Luis Buñuel’s film Simón del desierto/Simon of the Desert (1965), the devil, played by Silvia Pinal, transports the fasting anchorite from his column in the middle of the desert, in the 4th century, to 1960s New York: after an aerial shot, the camera pans down from the buildings to the ground to simulate the landing of the characters, who have come from a distant place and time. Then we are taken into a night club packed with dancing figures listening to rock’n’roll music, where Simón has turned into a beatnik and the devil into a young girl who is eager to try the Final Dance, called Carne Radioactiva/Radioactive Flesh. After warning Simón not to go back to his column, because it has already been occupied by someone else, she gets up and starts moving her body, yelling frantically, and the camera returns to the mass of youngsters, losing itself amongst them, until the image freezes and the word “Fin” appears. 1 This final sequence isn’t just a closing joke, it’s also a counterpoint to the rest of the film. Until then, Simón ‘is lost in the wild blue yonder, high on the pillar of delirium. He is the first astronaut, alone on a Space platform’; he is also reminiscent of a Robinson Crusoe whose imagination ‘obsessively conjures up that worst of all possible Man Fridays, the eternal adversary of his ideal, garbed in femininity’ (Durgnat 1968: 137-138). This isolation and silence are replaced by a discotheque full of noise and bodies that move tightly squeezed together, creating an informal multitude celebrating the youth of the flesh, as in a Dionysian bacchanal. The fast of the anchorite, both nutritive and sexual, is replaced by an explosion which is sensual and lively, but also perverted and contaminated: the Radioactive Flesh. There is, thus, an opposition created between hunger and consumption, between the lack of meat and the excess of flesh, and also an instability between repression and outburst which is common in Buñuel’s filmography, both in his stories and in his visual approach. In spite of its modest length (43 minutes) and its teasing tone, Simon of the Desert is a key film for the political cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Firstly, because it is the last Mexican film by Buñuel, a European filmmaker who would become a touchstone for the New Latin American Cinema. At that time, this continental movement was starting to garner international recognition, so Buñuel’s film can be regarded, in a sense, as the last work of an old master passing on the torch to a new generation. In fact, Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, who at that time had gained a certain prestige in Europe with his film Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol/Black God, White Devil (1964), is said to appear as one of the dancers in the last sequence of the film. Maybe this is just an urban-cinematic legend, as he is indistinguishable in the seething mass of people, and I have been unable to find any bibliographical reference stating exactly when he appears. But the accuracy of the anecdote 2 isn’t as important as its symbolic meaning: Buñuel returns to Europe and the Latin American new wave takes his place. Furthermore, Simon of the Desert is a key film because it clarifies one of the main themes in the relation between modern Latin American and European cinema. The dialectics between hunger and consumption, which is Simón’s conflict, had gained some importance in the early 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic, and it would become even more powerful by the end of the decade and the beginning of the next, with a long series of films on cannibalism. Throughout those years, hunger and consumption gained in importance from a narrative and aesthetic point of view, to become major themes in a political cinema concerned with the evolution of capitalism after the Second World War: above all, the consolidation of consumer society and the perpetuation of the misery of proletarians, both in rich countries and in the Third World. The economic and anthropological perversions of that time gave rise to a political cinema that was extremely interested in organic issues, following the path initiated by previous movements, such as Soviet cinema and Neorealism. In the case of Europe, numerous films could be cited: Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-end (1967), Liliana Cavani’s I cannibali/The Cannibals (1970) and Marco Ferreri’s La grande bouffe/The Big Feast (1973), all of which approach film from this perspective in order to study how consumption is represented, and how representation is consumed. On the other side of the Atlantic, perhaps their most important interlocutor was Brazil’s Cinema Novo. Supported in its beginnings by a left-wing government, it produced movies that denounced the poverty and starvation of the favelas and rural areas, particularly the drought-stricken north-eastern region of Sertão, as portrayed in Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Vidas Secas/Barren Lives (1963) and Ruy Guerra’s Os Fuzis/The Guns (1964). Later on, following the military coup of 1964 and the creation of a dictatorship, Brazilian cinema 3 became increasingly allegorical, often using cannibalism as a metaphor for political repression, as well as for cultural emancipation, as in Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1969), and Pereira dos Santos’s Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (1971). In all these cases, Brazilian film became influenced by, and influential on European cinema, thus making it possible to weave a rich web of influences that includes Glauber Rocha and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade and Marco Ferreri, Ruy Guerra and Werner Herzog. Pasolini, Brazil and La ricotta Of all the European filmmakers who were interested in the cinema of the Third World, Pier Paolo Pasolini occupies a special place. In fact, all his films could be considered as being focused on this subject, because for him the concept of the Third World was flexible and could be applied not only to Africa or Latin America, but also to the Italian periphery, both the Southern regions of the country and the outskirts of big cities. In his view, ‘Bandung is the capital of three quarters of the globe and it’s also the capital of half of Italy’ (Pasolini 1982: 121).i In the Roman sub-proletarians Pasolini detected what he would later search for in Palestine or Yemen: a particular culture which is marginalized from bourgeois wealth and, at the same time, menaced by its anthropological homogenization. Therefore, the extreme vitality and the sacralised figures of the suburbs of Rome shown in Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962) reappear in the figures and places of his films about the Third World, such as Appunti per un film sull’India/Notes for a Film about India (1968) and Appunti per un’Orestiada africana/Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970), as well as in movies such as Edipo re/Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969), where the discourse on myth is criss- 4 crossed by the remembrance of the city periphery and the factual presence of non-European countries. As a result, Pasolini’s works provoked great interest in the filmmakers from the Third World in general, and Brazil was no exception. The films of Glauber Rocha, leader of Cinema Novo, and Glauber Rocha himself, established an intense dialogue with Pasolini, starting with fact that each of their first features (Accattone and Barravento [1962]) were shown at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 1962, and finishing with Rocha’s A Idade da Terra/The Age of Earth (1980), a film that, according to the author, was inspired by reflections on Pasolini’s murder in 1975.